On May 28, the Democrat-controlled New York Legislature passed a bill that could more than double the number of charter schools in the state. It was a huge victory for billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a stinging defeat for New York’s teachers’ unions, which have long held sway in the Legislature.
Perhaps even more surprising (and/or troubling) is the fact that the bill wasn’t passed because of widespread success at New York’s current charter schools, but in hopes of grabbing a significant amount of the $4.3 billion in grant money being dangled by the Obama administration.
Indeed, states all across the country are making changes to their education laws and going gaga for charters, thanks to visions of free federal money. The federal program is called Race to the Top, and it’s an attempt at social engineering at its very worst. (There has to be a special place in hell for people who come up with these program names that sound lofty, even though the programs themselves end up being wastes of money and unnecessary diversions of focus and resources. We all know what the road to hell is paved with, and when the express bus to Hades is making its run, let no smarmy sloganeer be left behind.)
While proponents are dismayed that New York will now force charter schools to accept special-needs students, as well as non-English speakers and kids on free-lunch programs (which will almost certainly push charter-school test scores even lower), the vote in the New York Legislature was actually a double victory for Bloomberg, who was facing the politically disastrous prospect of firing thousands of teachers in the New York City school system. Now he won’t have to fire so many, and at the same time, many teachers will be shifted over into nonunion positions at the new charter schools. His pet project will grow, while the unions’ influence will diminish.
(To be sure, the teachers’ unions in New York are far from perfect. They have erected significant roadblocks in the process to fire incompetent—and sometimes even criminal—teachers, and have suffered for having done so.)
Also backing the bill were many New York City hedge-fund managers, a group of billionaires (and a few sad hundred-millionaires) who are best known for, through some ridiculous loophole, paying the same 15 percent tax rate as a bus driver, and then on only a portion of their obscene incomes. The hedge-funders claim to be impressed with the business-like approach to education, joining others in believing that ill-defined free-market principles will somehow come into play.
The charter-school “movement” is the pet project of billionaires in other parts of the country as well. There is the NewSchools Venture Fund, founded by the people who started Google and Amazon. Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, and the Walton (Walmart) family are all throwing money in the direction of charter schools. It should be noted that these billionaires are not starting new charter schools, but instead are finding charter schools that are showing signs of success, giving the donors the ability to claim that they are backing academic winners.
In many cases, this leads merely to an unholy alliance of guilty white liberals with money, and blissfully guilt-free white conservatives with agendas. While there are some charter schools that are showing signs of success, the vast majority do no better—and, in many cases, do much worse—than the public schools from which they are siphoning money and hand-picked students. A recent report by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University stated that although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers, this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional public schools.
Proponents of the bill in New York point to the success of places like the Harlem Children’s Zone, run with such stunning efficiency by Geoffrey Canada that the late Ed Bradley all but gushed when profiling Canada on 60 Minutes. As was the case with Joe Clark (the bullhorn-toting public-school principal portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the movie Lean on Me), Canada and his schools are turning out college-bound students in one of the worst parts of New York City.
But charter schools in other parts of New York City that try to copy Canada’s formula—including adopting school uniforms and longer hours—either fall far short of the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone, or fail altogether.
It’s like researchers who study centenarians, hoping to find a magic bullet for longevity. They learn that these people have a wide variety of dietary, drinking and exercise habits, and therefore are forced to conclude that some people just live longer than others. Well, some administrators are simply better at what they do, and some teachers are just better teachers than others.
Maybe this realization could come out of these charter-school experiments. Perhaps then, some of the wide-eyed, slobbering attention and the donated money could be shifted away from the 3 percent of kids in charter schools, and back to the 97 percent in traditional schools.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2010.
Spot on, Danehy.
This whole thing reminds me of the Ab Toner ads you see on TV. They make great claims (Lose 50 pounds a month!) and make it all seem soooo easy.
Of course, those Ab Toners probably work if you use them correctly and dedicate the time and energy it takes to a good workout program…and you diet, take on cardio exercises, etc. Most of those Ab Toners, however, end up in someone’s garage sale at the end of the year.
Same goes for the charters. We are shoveling millions into this trend when available evidence has already shown that they aren’t even performing as well as public schools. Shiny new programs, course materials and curriculum plans don’t mean anything without the teacher training and leadership that you find in all successful K-12 programs.
The part of this analogy that really sucks is that you can’t just chuck a school away when your initial enthusiasm wanes. There are countless examples around the US already of failed charters who drag down hundreds of kids with them.
The teacher’s unions out east should be embracing the replication of successful schools faster than anyone. They are currently getting in the way of their own future existence…and helping to fuel the replication of some of the more empty charter programs. Imagine if they used their bargaining instead to champion successful public school programs?
Caroline Hoxby just shredded the Stanford study on methodological grounds and published her own study on charter outcomes in New York city. In New York City, she found that for every year a student spent in a charter school, they were 7% more likely to pass the Regents exam.
In these studies, you have to carefully compare like to like to come to scientifically grounded conclusions. In this respect, New York is perfect because they have a huge backlog of students wanting to get into charter schools and new students are chosen via a lottery. Thus, you have an almost perfect experiment.
As for charter schools in general, Danehy is correct, charter school academic gains in Arizona are exactly equal to district school gains. However, charter schools with greater academic gains are showing slightly higher growth rates than either district or other charters. In 2009, this may have broken open even more. Charters grew over 9% while districts shrunk slightly. This trend may explode next year. Districts are reacting to the budget crisis with old style responses. Protecting pensions, reducing quality, cutting programs works when you have a monopoly but you get brutalized when the marketplace is competitive. Some school districts may be throwing themselves into a death spiral.
Meanwhile, high quality charters have cheap land and high quality teachers to expand explosively. Arizona is poised to have the best school system in the nation within a decade.
Ho, Boy, here we go again. I’m not going to believe so-called public charter schools are any better until and unless they can show these gains when they have the exact same student populations as the public schools down the street from them, including special needs students, English language learners, behavior problems, etc. It’s easy to teach kids who are already doing well and/or advanced, especially when you don’t allow the underachieving students to enroll in the first place. When the folks at Basis, for example, enroll 200 randomly picked students from Doolen Middle School, which I think is the nearest one to Basis, and then can magically have them all performing two years above grade level in a month or so, I’ll be impressed. But it’s easy to have students who are two years above grade level when that is all you enroll. Meanwhile, we are cutting the real public schools to the bone and expecting them to make gains at the same time. Charter schools are nothing more than private schools with insular student populations taking public money. I’m with you, Tom, we need to fund the public schools, stop the brain-drain that charters are causing, and start providing an excellent education to EVERY American child.
Dude! Charter schools are the “Public Schools”; what you call “Public Schools” are “Government Schools” – paychecks from government, land owned by government, curricula by government…..